Chapter 11: Mama

~ Emmie ~

She woke in the night thinking she had heard something.

Not a sound from outside — not the horses or the dogs or the wind. Something closer. Something that had come to her through sleep and left its shape in the air of the lodge without leaving its sound, the way a dream left a feeling after the images dissolved. She lay still in the dark and listened and heard only Kanti’s breathing beside her, slow and deep and steady, and the distant settling of the camp into its deep night silence.

She told herself it was nothing. She turned on her side and curved around him the way she always slept now, her warmth at his back, and she closed her eyes.

She did not sleep again for a long time.

Something had been said. She didn’t know what. Only that something had passed between waking and sleeping that she hadn’t quite caught, a word or a sound that had landed in her chest without reaching her ears, and her chest was still holding it, turning it over, trying to understand the shape of it.

She lay in the dark and listened to him breathe and finally, toward morning, let it go.

She would know when she knew.

The morning was ordinary in all the ways mornings had become ordinary — the fire, the water, the food, the work of the day taking shape around her the way it did now, naturally, without the effortful consciousness of the first days. She moved through the camp with the growing ease of someone who was learning its rhythms, and Kanti moved with her, attached at the hand or the side or the hem of her dress, his constant warm presence the fixed point around which her new world organized itself.

He was quieter than usual in the morning. Not withdrawn — he ate his breakfast and helped her with the water carrying and pointed out two words she mispronounced during her lesson with Suki with the gentle precision of someone who took language instruction seriously. But quieter. As though he was waiting for something. As though he had something on his mind that he was working his way toward in the patient, deliberate way he worked toward all important things.

She noticed but didn’t press. She had learned, in eleven days, that Kanti arrived at things in his own time and that rushing him produced nothing except a polite, immovable stillness that would outlast any pressure she could apply.

She waited.

It was midafternoon when it happened.

They were sitting at the edge of the central fire, just the two of them in the thin autumn sunlight that had broken through the clouds after three gray days. She was working on the hide-scraping the grandmother had been teaching her — still clumsy at it, her technique improving by slow degrees — and he was sitting in her lap in the way he sometimes did when he wanted to be close without being the focus of attention, his back to her chest, her arms working around him, his eyes half-closed in the sleepy, contented way of a child whose world is entirely in order.

She was not thinking about anything in particular. She was thinking about the hide and the angle of the scraper and the way the grandmother’s wrist moved that she was still trying to replicate. She was thinking about the thin sunlight and how good it felt on her face after three gray days. She was thinking that she was hungry and that supper was probably an hour away and that she could wait.

She was not thinking about the word.

He shifted in her lap. He turned — not all the way, just enough to tuck his face against the side of her neck, his nose against her jaw, his breath warm on her skin. She felt him settle there with the total, unselfconscious comfort of a child who has found his place and sees no reason to be anywhere else.